AMD acquires SeaMicro to grab share of microserver market

AMD's $334 million deal with SeaMicro is a strong move to improve within the …

AMD has made a $334 million bet on the energy-efficient "microserver" market. On Wednesday afternoon, the company announced that they have reached a $334 million agreement, to purchase SeaMicro, a successful microserver manufacturer.

Launched in 2007, SeaMicro quickly gained attention for their ability to combine cheap, low-end processors that could handle Web-centric server workloads. The company worked closely, if not exclusively, with Intel processors in recent years. SeaMicro's current SM server line uses Intel's Atom and "Sandy Bridge" processors.

“By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD’s transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator capable of staking a data center leadership position,” said Rory Read, AMD's president and CEO, in today's news release.

For now, AMD will continue to sell SeaMicro servers based on Intel Atom processors according to PC World. However, AMD expects to release the first SeaMicro servers based on AMD Opteron processors within the year.

Didn't AMD fire the CEO that turned it around because he had not focused on the low margin SoC (mobile) business (because they needed to focus their money on one thing and not on everything)? Now they make a $300 million bet on a company expanding the business in the server business?

Is AMD at all competitive in this space? Why does SeaMicro not offer AMD processor based systems? And isn't the competition to watch here ARM (or some of the ARM customers like Samsung who should have integrated expertise to build ARM based servers) for really low power servers.

The best hope I have for this, is that AMD has really identified a market for low power highly dense GPU servers. But wait, they sold their low power SoC GPU business to Qualcomm?

Didn't AMD fire the CEO that turned it around because he had not focused on the low margin SoC (mobile) business (because they needed to focus their money on one thing and not on everything)? Now they make a $300 million bet on a company expanding the business in the server business?

Is AMD at all competitive in this space? Why does SeaMicro not offer AMD processor based systems? And isn't the competition to watch here ARM (or some of the ARM customers like Samsung who should have integrated expertise to build ARM based servers) for really low power servers.

The best hope I have for this, is that AMD has really identified a market for low power highly dense GPU servers. But wait, they sold their low power SoC GPU business to Qualcomm?

It's right there in their financial reports, AMD's long term strategy: Over the next 10 years we plan tSQUIRREL!

Albeit a catchwordy catchword squirrel that'll help AMD with their continued domination of the minority market status.

Is AMD at all competitive in this space? Why does SeaMicro not offer AMD processor based systems? And isn't the competition to watch here ARM (or some of the ARM customers like Samsung who should have integrated expertise to build ARM based servers) for really low power servers.

The best hope I have for this, is that AMD has really identified a market for low power highly dense GPU servers. But wait, they sold their low power SoC GPU business to Qualcomm?

Their Bobcat cores surpass the Atom, definitely on performance and perhaps on performance/watt. This goes hand in hand with AMD saying they're no longer focusing on producing the highest-end CPUs, moving more towards shorter design cycles with less custom design and less bleeding-edge processes. Ganging up their lower performing, but high perf/watt CPU for the physicalization movement makes sense.

As far as GPUs go, the IGPs available on their current Fusion products and GCN-based ones in the future will be a great fit. Imagine a super cheap cluster with tons of CPU cores and GPUs as vector processors. Seems like an all-around smart move on AMD's part.

Physicalization only makes sense because of low margin on low power parts. It's good for the system builder and good for the end user, but not good for the chip maker that would rather be selling high margin high power parts.

They're going to take a company that focuses on Atom servers and make them run Opterons? Are they going to rebrand a Bobcat as an Opteron or are they going to turn a specialized small server provider into another commodity low/mid range server provider? Where's the differentiation?

Obviously Read has more information than me, but I'm have a hard time making sense of it.

I think AMD has lost all sense of direction altogether. It is trying to find newer markets for its underperforming (in all aspects - power, efficiency) chips while completely ignoring the fact that you can only go so far on inferior technology. And coming from AMD, it is even more sad for they were the ones who would focus on getting the 'fundamentals' right and Intel was the one which would rely more on marketing. Remember, AMD brought us multi-core, HyperTransport, on-die memory controller, 64-bit, etc. But alas, they seem to have come to disbelieve in their own ideals. For one, making low power/low wattage CPUs out of choice is one thing; making only low power / low wattage CPUs because you can't make high power CPUs is another. And all this while Intel continues its onslaught with high power / low wattage CPUs. It is only a matter of an iteration or two before SandyBridge (or some derivative thereof) will be replacing Atom at that wattage level.

Already for almost the price of a bobcat (motherboard + cpu) you can get an I3 + H67 platform which runs just as cool and quiet while offering a performance several times above that of a bobcat system. So low power server chips are going to be in but not 'that' low power! AMD should still continue to figure out how to make a powerful and low wattage CPU and then perhaps focus on how to utilize it in different markets.

This is a brilliant move by AMD. Granted BullDozer is not low power enough but the interconnect technologies of SeaMicro can help AMD do > 8 socket systems very cheaply compare to existing interconnects. In time when BD cores becomes very low power, they can co-exist with ARM cores into a hybrid virtualization server which could be very compelling as theDB cores can power-off when no used. So one can end up with a great server with fewer compromises at a great price!.Also, AMD has the ARM license, so they can actually make x86/ARM hybrid cores that run together giving home servers a great boost while maintaining low power states and great pricing.